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Well, this is certainly an interesting premise..."Dell's biggest problem is that its one-time differentiation--low-cost hardware assembly and distribution--is now common industry practice. Indeed, it now routinely gets beaten at its own game, as called out in a recent article by Ashlee Vance in The New York Times...

More details on Freescale's netbook announcement at the CES show...

What are your tool habits, and how have they evolved...?"Tim Bray: '[H]ere it is nearly thirty years into my programming career and I'm still debugging with print statements.' "Heh. Same here, though it’s only been 25 years for me (wow, 'only' 25 years?).

There really is no such thing as a completely new idea. A hacking tale from Jono Bacon..."Well kind of…in a way…possibly…OK, not at all. "The other day I was digging through some old articles that I wrote. To my amusement, I saw a reference to a little program I hacked up once when I was involved as a KDE developer. I had totally forgotten about it, and I figured it would be fun to share the story.... [more]

A detailed look inside a JavaScript-based desktop app...

Package management on Unix-like systems has improved out of all recognition in the last decade. However, improvements are being suggested all the time, ranging from improved utilities for existing package tools like apt and yum to Autopackage and Zero Install, both of which allow non-users to install software, to Conary, which combines package management with version control to permit multiple versions of the same software to co-exist.... [more]

Neil McAllister portends the development future...

Wondering what the new year will bring for GNOME? Here's some answers..."Scott: It strikes me that people tend to think of GNOME as just the shell, but it is really a set of other stand-alone, independent applications, as well. Talk a little bit about that relationship between GNOME the shell and all those other projects, as well as what it means for something to be under that GNOME umbrella.

Perl development is now in a single open source repository...

Nova, it's reported, is based on Linux..."Palm is rumored to be launching a smartphone on Thursday that runs Nova, its next-generation operating system, according to a report Sunday on CrunchGear."The report, which cites 'a trusted source,' says the device will have a full QWERTY keyboard that will slide under the touchscreen..." [Read more at The Open Road]... [more]